The Founders’ limitation on direct democracy – Part II – Checks and balances

As discussed in Part I, the Founders wished to establish a form of government that would address the abuses inherent in various other forms of government. They chose a democratic republic which they believed would insure the continuing preservation of the new nation. The first great challenge in writing a Constitution for the democratic republic was to create a system of checks and balances between the three branches of government, between the large and small states, and between the national government and the states. In the legislative arena this was accomplished by establishing a bicameral legislature to insure that individual state voices and diverse regional interests would not be overwhelmed, ignored, or trampled upon by larger states and/or coalitions of states. The Founders believed that it was necessary to balance the will of the majority of the population (guarded by the House) with the will of the majority as determined by the states (guarded by the Senate).[1] The creation of a bicameral legislature was an overt action of the Founders to impose a Constitutional limitation on direct democracy. Without such a balancing of power it is doubtful that the Convention would have produced a document acceptable to the representatives of the former colonies. A second overt action of the Founders to impose a Constitutional limitation on democracy was establishment of the Electoral College. The remainder of this article will address this subject.

Why did the Founders establish the Electoral College?

The concern for a system of checks and balances in electing the head of the executive branch of government was also on the minds of the delegates to the Constitutional Convention. When debating the procedure for selecting the president, three methods were proposed and subsequently rejected.

1. Congress would select the President – This proposal was rejected for three reasons. First, it was felt that this method would engender rancorous partisanship that would inhibit future legislative efforts. Second, because Congress was such a small body, there was concern that foreign governments could more easily influence the outcome of an election through bribery and corruption. Lastly, the election of the head of the executive branch of government by the legislative branch would compromise the president’s independence from the legislative branch.
2. State legislatures would select the President – This proposal was rejected because of the fear that the federal republic would be undermined through erosion of federal authority by a president that was too indebted to the states.
3. The President would be elected by a popular national vote – This was rejected “not because the framers distrusted the people but rather because the larger populous states would have much greater influence than the smaller states and therefore the interests of those smaller states could be disregarded or trampled.” A further concern was that a national popular election would encourage regionalism through creation of coalitions among the more populous states which would damage lasting national unity.[2]

To solve the dilemma, the Convention delegates appointed a “Committee of Eleven” to study the problem and propose a viable alternative which resulted in establishment of the Electoral College.[3] Again, this action was the Founders’ second explicit action to impose a Constitutional limitation on direct democracy.

James Madison, a signor of the Constitution and often referred to as its father, wrote:

The Constitution is nicely balanced with the federative and popular principles; the Senate are guardians of the former, and the House of Representatives of the latter; and any attempts to destroy this balance, under whatever specious names or pretenses that may be presented, should be watched with a jealous eye.[4] [emphasis added]

In the election of a president under the Electoral College system, the smaller states receive a slightly greater voice, proportionally speaking, than the larger states. In other words, the Electoral College system tends to slightly over-represent voters in the smaller states, but at the same time adds a measure of protection to those states without the clout to defend their interests from those of much larger states.

How the Electoral College Works

The Electoral College is a process whereby once each four years Americans voting in the Presidential election cast ballots to select which persons that will serve as electors to select the President of the United States. In each state, a candidate for the Presidency has his or her own set of electors that appear on the ballot. These electors are generally chosen by the candidate’s political party within that state. Even though a candidate’s name appears above the list of his or her electors on the election ballot, the voter is actually voting for those electors. The candidate whose electors receive the most votes in a state receive all of that state’s electoral votes except for Nebraska and Maine which award an electoral vote to the winner of the popular vote in each Congressional district within those states.[5]

The number of electoral votes each state has is determined by the number of senators and members of the House Representatives in that state. For example, Oklahoma has seven electors because it has two senators and five representatives. There are 435 members of the House of Representatives and 100 Senators which total 535 electors. The 23rd Amendment to the Constitution gave three electoral votes to the District of Columbia, an amount equal to the least number of electors a state may have. Thus, there are 538 electors. To become the President, a candidate must receive an absolute majority of the electoral votes which is 270.[6] If there is a tie of 269 votes for each candidate, the House of Representatives selects the President from among the top three candidates.[7]

Subsequent to the casting of votes by each state’s electors in December following the election, the governor of each state submits a Certificate of Ascertainment which declares the winning presidential candidate based on the electors’ votes. That Certificate along with each elector’s Certificate of Vote is forwarded to Congress and the National Archives. Each state’s electoral votes are counted in a joint session of Congress on the 6th of January.[8] The newly elected president is sworn in and takes office on January 20.

2016 Presidential Election and the Electoral College

Columnist E. J. Dionne, a member of the Washington Post Writers Group, believes the majority of Americans will be disempowered in 2017 because Hilary Clinton won the popular vote by approximate 2.6 million. However, Donald Trump won the Electoral College vote by a relatively wide margin of 306 to 232 and became the President-Elect. Dionne writes:

The inherent illogic of our practices, and the fact that they have nothing to do with the Founders’ intentions, is underscored by this contradiction: We are supposed to ignore the national popular vote, but deeply respect Trump’s narrow 77,000 popular-vote advantage in three states that will tip the Electoral College his way.[9]

But Dionne is wrong on all three counts. The practices of the Electoral College are very logical when considering that the Founder’s reasons behind it are based on the principles of a republican form of government. Those practices have everything to do with the Founders’ intentions for they specifically rejected the election of the president by popular vote. And we must respect the outworking of the Electoral College, even when it contradicts the popular vote because it balances the federative and popular principles of a republican form of government about which Madison spoke.

Dionne calls the workings of the Electoral College an “outdated system” which will allow the current government to pursue “quite radical policies destined to arouse considerable resistance from the disempowered majority.”[10] But disempowerment has been the protocol of liberals for decades through wrongful interpretation of the Constitution in ways contrary to its plain language and intent of the Founders, through decisions of unelected judges that effectively legislate through their decrees, and a federal bureaucracy that misinterprets and corrupts the laws passed by Congress and thereby undermines the will of the people while pursuing the liberal agenda. Two major examples of this judicial and bureaucratic over-reach are the so-called public “bathroom policies” pushed by the LGBT lobby and the pro-abortion policies of the left which the majority of Americans oppose.

So are both the supposed unfairness of the Electoral College and the wrongdoings of the unelected judiciary and bureaucracy morally equivalent? Absolutely not! The Electoral College is working as the Founders intended. Without the restraining force of the Electoral College, the heavily populated liberal strongholds clinging to the east and west coasts would steamroll the interests of the citizens of a vast majority of states which eventually will become little more than administrative districts used by the federal government to impose the will of the concentrated majority on a powerless minority located in what many consider to be merely “fly over” country. The potential power of these concentrated and growing majorities without the restraining influence of the Electoral College becomes alarmingly clear when examining the following statistics.

• In 2015, nine states accounted for over half the population of the United States (meaning that the remaining forty-one states accounted for the other half).[11] Six of these nine states border the Gulf of Mexico, the Atlantic Ocean, or the Pacific Ocean. The remaining three border the Great Lakes.
• California is the most populous state with slightly over 39,000,000 residents. It requires the populations of twenty-two states having the lowest populations plus the District of Columbia to equal or slightly exceed the population of California.[12]
• The eleven most populous states have 270 electoral votes, enough to elect the president without the need for even one vote from the remaining thirty-nine states and the District of Columbia.[13]
• In the 2016 presidential election, 2,622 counties with mostly smaller populations voted for the Republican nominee while 490 counties with mostly larger populations voted for the Democratic nominee.[14] This large-versus-small county voting split is apparent even in those Democratic states with large population counties that vote Democratic and counties with relatively small populations that vote Republican.

Dionne’s principal argument against the Electoral College process is that it is unfair and inherently antidemocratic because some votes do not have the same proportional impact as other votes which violates the so-called “one-man-one vote” proposition. They contend that one man ought to have one vote proportional to all other votes. But proportional equality in the vote of each citizen was not the intent of the Founders for reasons which we have previously discussed, i.e., balancing both federative and popular principles as opposed to a direct democracy in electing the president which was specifically rejected by the Founders.

Should the nation abandon the Electoral College process for electing the president in favor of a popular vote, several undesirable consequences will occur. Campaigns would tend to ignore individual voters and the important interests of their state and region. Rather, the candidates would conduct an almost continual media campaign aimed at voters in the most populous regions of the country (e.g., the nine states comprising over half the population of the United States). Candidates would heavily invest in electronic media advertising and have little interest in mobilizing constituencies, addressing the interests of specific groups, or voter registration and education. Since the population centers are largely urban which tend to be more liberal, presidential campaigns would focus on and become substantially beholden to liberal interests and brush aside the beliefs and interests of the remainder of the country. Rather than being an illogical, outdated practice as claimed by Dionne, the Electoral College in light of the growing power of the more populous states is more than ever a critical component in preserving the republican form of government and balancing federative and popular principles by which it operates.

Kathleen Parker is also a member of the Washington Post Writers Group. Unlike Dionne who wishes to scrap the Electoral College altogether, Parker wanted to use the Electoral College to deprive Donald Trump of the presidency. In a recent editorial column, Parker encouraged Republican electors to ignore the rules and wishes of the voters in their respective states and not cast their 306 Electoral vote for Donald Trump. Parker hoped that a defection of 37 electors will reduce Trump’s electoral votes to 269, deprive him of the presidency, and send someone else to the Oval Office.[15] Parker wrote:

If there are 37 Republicans among them with the courage to perform their moral duty and protect the nation from a talented but dangerous president-elect, a new history of heroism will have to be written. Please be brave.[16]

In an attempt to support her case, Parker quoted Alexander Hamilton who wrote that the Electoral College

“…affords a moral certainty that the office of President will never fall to the lot of any man who is not in an eminent degree endowed with the requisite qualifications.” Electors would prevent the “tumult and disorder” that would result from the candidate’s exploiting “talents for low intrigue, and the little arts of popularity.”[17]

It’s interesting to note that Parker’s own low intrigue readily ignores over sixty-one million voters who judged Donald Trump as having been endowed with the requisite qualifications for the presidency (at least when compared with Clinton) in favor of a few “brave” Electoral voters who must “perform their moral duty and protect the nation from a talented but dangerous president elect.”

We should not be surprised at Ms. Parker’s audacity for this is the typical mindset of our liberal betters. In their minds they think they know what’s good for the country far better than the voters, and if they could just get rid of that pesky Electoral College thing they would really show the electorate what’s best for them.

Larry G. Johnson

Sources:

[1] David Barton, “Electoral College: Preserve or Abolish?” Wallbuilder.com. January 2001,
http://www.wallbuilders.com/LIBissuesArticles.asp?id=95 (accessed December 12, 2016).
[2] Ibid.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Ibid.
[5] “What is the Electoral College?” U.S. Electoral College, National Archives and Records Administration, https://www.archives.gov/federal-register/electoral-college/about.html (accessed December 12, 2016).
[6] Ibid.
[7] David Barton, “Electoral College: Preserve or Abolish?” Wallbuilder.com, January 2001.
[8] “What is the Electoral College?” U.S. Electoral College, National Archives and Records Administration.
[9] E. J. Dionne, “The disempowered majority of 2017,” Tulsa World, December 9, 2016, A-10,
[10] Ibid.
[11] State Population by Rank, 2015, Infoplease.com. http://www.infoplease.com/us/states/population-by-rank.html (accessed December 13, 2016).
[12] Ibid.
[13] “What is the Electoral College?” U.S. Electoral College, National Archives and Records Administration.
[14] Zeke J. Miller and Chris Wilson, “See a Map That Shows Exactly How Donald Trump Won,” Time, December 1, 2016. http://time.com/4587866/donald-trump-election-map/ (accessed December 13, 2016).
[15] Kathleen Parker, “Or will the electors revolt?” Tulsa World, December 10, 2016. A-15
[16] Ibid.
[17] Ibid.